All is near and can't be touched

''All is near and can't be touched''
(from the poem 'between going and staying the day wavers' by Octavio Paz)

Alexandra Wiesenfeld's new large scale oil paintings are landscapes created out of chunks of paint, a maze of marks and bursts of almost painfully intense color. There are intended breaks and rifts in the picture plane as if it had been ripped apart into sections that were stitched together again slightly off register. Taking her own and found photos as a starting point Wiesenfeld turns the surface of the painting into worlds of enormous plasticity with ravines, ridges and crevices that open the view into more hidden spaces. The meshes of roots or undergrowth could as well be entangled bundles of nerves, blood vessels or neuronal filaments.

Coming from another direction Detlef Baltrock's abstract paintings seem to meet Wiesenfeld's halfway in the middle. Baltrock intersperses layers of transparent fog like washes with marks that carry an expressive eloquence as if one could read them yet evading any figurative interpretation. His visual language is informed by a musical sensitivity, which manifests itself in the subtle rhythms, accentuations, phrasing and chromatic shifts of his surfaces. His works are like inner landscapes of the psyche reflecting back on the viewer's perception of them.

Tobias Sternberg carves away material from the handle of the axe until only fragile strands remain, forming two spirals bending in opposite directions, both fighting and supporting each other, thereby turning the inherent brutal efficiency of the ax into a beautiful, enigmatic object, which is too fragile to be touched. By making it unusable he transforms the ax from a familiar, mundane tool into an object of contemplation.